Harvard Divinity School

Why did some early Christians consider Mary Magdalene an apostle while others did not? This book examines how the conferral, or withholding, of apostolic status operated as a tool of persuasion in the politics of early Christian literature.

This volume brings together studies of Ephesos—a major city in the Greco-Roman period and a primary center for the spread of Christianity into the Western world—by an international array of scholars from the fields of classics, fine arts, history of religion, New Testament, ancient Christianity, and archaeology.

This book discusses the history, topography, and urban development of Corinth with special attention to civic and private religious practices in the Roman colony. Expert analysis of the latest archaeological data is coupled with consideration of what can be known about the emergence and evolution of religions in Corinth.

The discovery and publication of the Apocryphon of James has significantly expanded the spectrum of early Christian literature about Jesus. Cameron provides a form-critical analysis which aims to clarify the ways in which the sayings of Jesus were used and transformed in early Christian communities.

This book explores how scholarly constructions of Christian origins participate in contemporary efforts to confirm or challenge particular understandings of the essence of Christianity. Johnson-DeBaufre offers alternative readings to key Q texts, readings that place an interest in the community that shaped Jesus at the center of inquiry.

This book demonstrates the intimate connection between Troeltsch’s philosophical writings on the essence of Christianity and his historical investigations of Christianity’s past. Pearson argues that as a result of his historical work, Troeltsch moved beyond the category of essence and sought new ways of theorizing Christian identity in the context of modernity’s pluralistic yet fragmented society.

This description of the Americanization of the Puritan ministry as it was transported to the New England colonies offers a host of new insights into American religious history. This book also affords the reader one of the freshest and most comprehensive histories of the seventeenth-century New England mind and society.

The relationship between religion and modern culture remains a controversial issue within Christian theology. This book focuses on Paul Tillich’s interpretation of modern culture and the influence of capitalism. Using the concept of “cultural modernity,” Francis Ching-Wah Yip reconstructs Tillich’s interpretation of modernity and shows that Tillich’s notion of theonomy served to underscore the problems of modernity and to develop a response.

In the first major study in English of the Epistle of the Apostles (Epistula Apostolorum), Julian V. Hills probes its remarkable witness to the traditions that circulated in Jesus’ name in the second century. Hills tackles the document’s literary framework, collecting and assessing signals to its composition. In detailed analyses of passages, Hills shows how older traditions were reshaped and interpreted according to the distinctive communal situation and theological vision of the author. This expanded edition of the out-of-print original, published in 1990, includes a new preface and bibliography.

In this study, Schifferdecker offers a close literary and theological reading of the book of Job—particularly of God’s speeches at the end of the book—in order to articulate its creation theology, which is particularly pertinent in our environmentally-conscious age.

Some of the best-known Biblical episodes are found in the story of David’s rise to kingship in First and Second Samuel. Why was this series of stories included in the Bible? Short contends that the story depicts the confirmation of David’s election through his gradual emergence as the beloved son of Jesse, Saul, all Israel, and yhwh Himself.

This interdisciplinary volume is the first to bring together international scholars of religion, archaeologists, and scholars of art and architectural history to investigate social, political, and religious life in Roman and early Christian Thessalonike, an important metropolis in the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian periods and beyond.

This volume explores the origins of Iblīs as a tragic figure in the Qur’an. Although it is often said that there is no place for tragedy in Islam, Bodman’s careful examination of the Iblīs story shows that the tragic exists even in the Qur’an and forms part of the vision of medieval Sufi mystics and modern social critics alike.